(Here’s my pre-concert lecture delivered at 7 p.m. last Saturday in New York. Due to a change in plans, it wasn’t actually given in Carnegie Hall, but across the street in a meeting room at the Park Central Hotel.)
Carnegie talk
Hi everyone,
Welcome to Carnegie Hall. I’m Tim Mangan, Pacific Symphony’s writer-in-residence, and I’m going to give a short talk on the program we’re about to hear, hoping to prepare you for it. But first I’d like to talk a little about Carnegie Hall itself, because it, too, is going to be very much part of the experience.
Carnegie Hall opened on May 5, 1891. The original program had Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony playing “America,” Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3 and the New York premiere of Berlioz’s Te Deum, with the Oratorio Society joining. The special guest of the evening was Tchaikovsky. Damrosch had wanted him to compose a new march for the occasion, but instead he just used his Coronation March that he wrote for the coronation of Tsar Alexander III, giving it a different title, Marche solennelle, hoping that no one would notice that it was an earlier piece. Tchaikovsky conducted it himself that night. The story goes that the march was recognized as the Coronation March and this pleased the composer, who said that American audiences knew his music better than the Russians did.
(Incidentally, on the same trip to America, Tchaikovsky also visited the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore — the alma mater of tonight’s featured composer Philip Glass, and my alma mater too.)
The hall was at first called just Music Hall (founded by Andrew Carnegie) but soon, at the start of the 1894-95 season, it was officially changed to Carnegie Hall. But if you go out front and look up, those words — Music Hall founded by Andrew Carnegie — are still there, etched in the building above the entrance. Andrew Carnegie was one of the richest men in the world at the time, an industrialist who spent the latter part of his life as a philanthropist, funding this hall and of course Carnegie libraries around the country.
